Amano was unusually blunt for an international diplomat, signaling to many that he is losing patience with the Islamic Republic.
Amano outright dismissed Iran’s allegation his agency may have been infiltrated by saboteurs and voiced concern about “intensive activities” at the Parchin military installation that his inspectors want to examine.
The relations that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have with Iran have become testy in recent months.
Iran’s nuclear energy chief, Fereydun Abbasi-Davani, said in Vienna last month that the IAEA may have been infiltrated by “terrorists and saboteurs.” Amano stood diplomatically mute for a while—but gave up that pose last week.
“Sometimes it is not useful to dignify these claims by providing an official answer,” Amano said in London when asked about the saboteur accusation. But then he struck out: “This is baseless…. We are not involved in these activities.”
Asked whether Iran was continuing to dismantle a site US inspectors want to see at the Parchin military complex, Amano told Reuters: “Yes.” There were no diplomatic niceties.
Addressing London’s Chatham House think-tank, he later said: “They are undertaking quite intensive activities at Parchin.”
The UN nuclear agency suspects Iran, possibly a decade ago, may have carried out explosives tests relevant for a nuclear weapons trigger in a steel chamber at Parchin.
Amano said the IAEA was committed to dialogue with the Islamic Republic. “We have offered that we are willing to meet with them in the very near future…. That [will] be a high-level meeting and I hope we can have a meeting quite soon,” he said.
A senior IAEA team has held a series of meetings with Iran since January, but they have yet to yield concrete results. The last round of discussions took place in August.
Another Western diplomat in the Austrian capital said the IAEA had “really been pushing Iran to set a date” for a new meeting, but Tehran had so far declined to do so. “The delay is coming from the Iranian side,” the envoy said.
Mock trial assails Islamic Republic for 80’s executions
AKHAVAN. . . prosecutor
Critics of the Islamic Republic have staged a mock trial of the regime for its mass executions during the 1980s.
The three-day event was held last week at the Peace Palace in The Hague, which also houses the International Court of Justice.
But the “International Tribunal for Iran” was not an official international institution. It was intended to build a record against the Islamic Republic for human rights abuses, but cannot punish anyone.
The mock trial heard statements from witnesses who accused Iran of killing some 20,000 people—political opponents and religious and ethnic minorities—during the decade.
The mock trial lacked a defense representative.
Its prosecutor, however, had real standing. He was Payam Akhavan, an Iranian-Canadian who once served as a legal adviser in the Prosecutor’s Office at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and has represented several governments in cases before international courts. Akhavan, who was born in Tehran, is currently a law professor at McGill University in Montreal.
Akhavan said of the mock trial, “This is an important step forward in the struggle of the Iranian people for justice. There can be no democratic future in Iran without addressing the horrific crimes of the past.”
